Keeping Your Recording Sessions Organized
Sunday, June 10th, 2007This article will discuss some ways to keep everything organized during tracking in your home studio. This involves:
- Recalls
- paper work
- photographs
Recalls: A recall sheet is a diagram of the faceplate of a piece of gear. Print it out and mark all the settings on it. As well, write what instrument it is being used on, which song, and what is coming into the input and going out. You should have a recall sheet for every piece of gear and a copy of it for every song if the settings will change. Recall sheets are incredibly useful if you ever need to re-record anything, if all the settings are carefully documented its just a matter of getting a better performance. Also for your own benefit, you may want to use a similar guitar tone on a later project, you can easily recreate it any time later. There are a couple of websites that provide recall sheets for commonly used pieces of gear, occasionally the manufacturer’s website will have some available. Failing that, there is often a diagram of all the controls in the manual, you can make your own from some editing of a photo.
Paper work: some of this is pre-production and some of this is during production.
If the artist sent you a demo before the recording, you will want the lyrics typed out for each song. With this you can discuss changes to the vocal parts, and song structure early on, rather than when the clock is ticking in the studio. Its also a really good idea to have all the guitar and bass parts tabbed out or at least chords before you start which will hopefully eliminate the “How did that go again?” headaches. Having some blank tab or score paper is a good idea too.
I like to make a recording progress chart with all the song titles, tempos, and instruments on it, as each part is completed you fill in the box, it makes a very quick and easy way for everyone to know how far you’ve come and how much farther to go. Some studios have a black or white board for this, I just make the chart in excel and print it out, I also email it to the band. A take sheet is also really helpful for keeping a record of how many takes you’ve done and what problems there were on each.
Photographs: These days a digital camera is invaluable in the studio, it takes far less time to snap a picture of a piece of gear than it is to print out a recall sheet and fill it out. It is still a good idea to have the recall sheet, because the routing can be documented on it too. Photos of mic placements are important, but make sure you write down measurements as well. Bands will appreciate having the camera in the studio so they can put the photos on their MySpace.
So as you can see, this is a lot of work, that is why big studios have interns and assistants, but there is even more paperwork when using a large console and tape machines, in addition to the above there is input, routing, bussing, cross patching, sends and returns, inserts and track sheets that needs to be filled out.
